Down and Out in Paris and London

Chapter XII

By far my best time at the hotel was when I went to help the waiter on
the fourth floor. We worked in a small pantry which communicated with the
cafeterie by service lifts. It was delightfully cool after the cellars, and
the work was chiefly polishing silver and glasses, which is a humane job.
Valenti, the waiter, was a decent sort, and treated me almost as an equal
when we were alone, though he had to speak roughly when there was anyone
else present, for it does not do for a waiter to be friendly with
PLONGEURS. He used sometimes to tip me five francs when he had had a good
day. He was a comely youth, aged twenty-four but looking eighteen, and,
like most waiters, he carried himself well and knew how to wear his
clothes. With his black tail-coat and white tie, fresh face and sleek brown
hair, he looked just like an Eton boy; yet he had earned his living since
he was twelve, and worked his way up literally from the gutter. Grossing
the Italian frontier without a passport, and selling chestnuts from a
barrow on the northern boulevards, and being given fifty days' imprisonment
in London for working without a permit, and being made love to by a rich
old woman in a hotel, who gave him a diamond ring and afterwards accused
him of stealing it, were among his experiences. I used to enjoy talking to
him, at slack times when we sat smoking down the lift shaft.

My bad day was when I washed up for the dining-room. I had not to wash
the plates, which were done in the kitchen, but only the other crockery,
silver, knives and glasses; yet, even so, it meant thirteen hours' work,
and I used between thirty and forty dishcloths during the day. The
antiquated methods used in France double the work of washing up.
Plate-racks are unheard-of, and there are no soap-flakes, only the treacly
soft soap, which refuses to lather in the hard, Paris water. I worked in a
dirty, crowded little den, a pantry and scullery combined, which gave
straight on the dining-room. Besides washing up, I had to fetch the
waiters' food and serve them at table; most of them were intolerably
insolent, and I had to use my fists more than once to get common civility.
The person who normally washed up was a woman, and they made her life a
misery.

It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that
only a double door was between us and the dining-room. There sat the
customers in all their splendour--spotless table-cloths, bowls of
flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim; and here, just a
few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For it really was disgusting
filth. There was no time to sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered
about in a compound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, torn paper and trampled
food. A dozen waiters with their coats off, showing their sweaty armpits,
sat at the table mixing salads and sticking their thumbs into the cream
pots. The room had a dirty, mixed smell of food and sweat. Everywhere in
the cupboards, behind the piles of crockery, were squalid stores of food
that the waiters had stolen. There were only two sinks, and no washing
basin, and it was nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the
water in which clean crockery was rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of
this. There were a coco-nut mat and a mirror outside the dining-room door,
and the waiters used to preen themselves up and go in looking the picture
of cleanliness.

It is an instructive sight to see a waiter going into a hotel
dining-room. As he passes the door a sudden change comes over him. The set
of his shoulders alters; all the dirt and hurry and irritation have dropped
off in an instant. He glides over the carpet, with a solemn priest-like
air. I remember our assistant MAITRE D'HOTEL, a fiery Italian, pausing at
the dining-room door to address an apprentice who had broken a bottle of
wine. Shaking his fist above his head he yelled (luckily the door was more
or less soundproof):

'TU ME FAIS--Do you call yourself a waiter, you young bastard? You a
waiter! You're not fit to scrub floors in the brothel your mother came
from. MAQUEREAU!'

Words failing him, he turned to the door; and as he opened it he
delivered a final insult in the same manner as Squire Western in TOM JONES.

Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it dish in hand,
graceful as a swan. Ten seconds later he was bowing reverently to a
customer. And you could not help thinking, as you saw him bow and smile,
with that benign smile of the trained waiter, that the customer was put to
shame by having such an aristocrat to serve him.

This washing up was a thoroughly odious job--not hard, but boring
and silly beyond words. It is dreadful to think that some people spend
their whole decades at such occupations. The woman whom I replaced was
quite sixty years old, and she stood at the sink thirteen hours a day, six
days a week, the year round; she was, in addition, horribly bullied by the
waiters. She gave out that she had once been an actress--actually, I
imagine, a prostitute; most prostitutes end as charwomen. It was strange to
see that in spite of her age and her life she still wore a bright blonde
wig, and darkened her eyes and painted her face like a girl of twenty. So
apparently even a seventy-eight-hour week can leave one with some vitality.